UK Sourcers News

Our next UK Sourcers “Hack” Meetup will be taking place in January 2013 – stay tuned for an announcement later this week! We like to keep these events small to ensure that everyone gets a chance to take part, be heard and gain value. There will be a small number of tickets available so be sure to register as soon as you can. To hear about the event first, be sure to join the UK Sourcers LinkedIn group.

Social Sourcing

As I mentioned in my last news post, LinkedIn’s Events Application was shut down on 26th November – did you notice? I wrote a post giving more information and details of five other tools that you might think about using now that LinkedIn Events is no more.

Opportunities

Amazon is hiring recruiters and sourcers for their new London Development Center. Do get in touch with Becky McCarey if you would be interested in learning more.

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UK Sourcers News

Last week we held our first event. I’d like to thank everyone that came along – the attendees were the event. I really enjoyed seeing people sharing their challenges and chatting about what they’re doing in the world of sourcing. It was also great to learn a few new things! I had been a little nervous about the “no agenda” format, but everyone seemed happy to get going and dive in. Extra big thanks to Ken and Florence at Mind Candy for providing such an inspiring setting and for keeping hunger at bay with plenty of pizza!

Ideally I would like to make the events a regular thing – and not always in London. So if your company would like to host one, then just let me know. When I get the next event off the ground, It’ll be announced in our LinkedIn group first.

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UK Sourcers News

Our first event is “sold out”!
If you’d like to come, get on the Waitlist in case someone drops out at the last minute. If you already have your free ticket to the UK Sourcers’ Meetup on 6th September, don’t forget to let me know if you find you can no longer make it.

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Twitter is great if you are starting to explore Social Media or looking to learn more about Sourcing. It has been instrumental as part of my professional development and led to virtually all my business, one way or another. Twitter has helped me discover loads of useful content and meet many very smart people.

I had the luxury of learning how to use Twitter when it was a much quieter, more relaxed place. There were hardly any businesses or celebrities yet – I remember the day that Stephen Fry joined. There was no pressure to be getting “ROI” out of it – it was just a fun way to connect with like minded people.

It seems easy to succumb to these pressures now and end up not getting the most out of this fantastic platform.

So, when you join Twitter, please don’t…

Excessively tweet links to jobs

The Problem: Lisa Jones of Barclay Jones recently wrote about this problem on the UK recruiter blog, I recommend having a read. While Job tweets are of interest to active job seekers, the majority of people are not actively looking for a new job and might need a more subtle approach. Plus – it’s REALLY BORING!

What to do instead: While jobs are a very easy thing to tweet when you are a beginner, you do have a wealth of experience in your industry and in recruitment – why not demonstrate this on Social Media? Take a look at this list of 20 things for recruiters and sourcers to tweet about. You could always set up a separate Twitter account that just tweets links to job, but be clear that this is all it does and let followers know how they can actually talk to you.

Follow loads of people at once

The Problem: Following people is probably the best way to get their attention, so don’t waste it. When you first join Twitter, you won’t have said much and you won’t be entirely sure what you are doing. If someone follows me and they haven’t tweeted yet then I am unlikely to follow them back as I don’t know what I will be signing up for. The same goes for someone that has only Tweeted five times – I don’t know if that person is just dipping their toe in the birdbath or if they will stick with it.

What to do instead: Lay low for a week or two. Get your profile looking good with a well written bio and a profile picture. You should also get some Tweets under your belt and learn how the lingo works. Follow a few colleagues or people that you know use Twitter well (aim for about 20 people) that way you can learn from what they do – what sort of Tweets do you like to get in your stream? Once you have found your feet, take Twitter to the next level and follow some more people. Rince and repeat.

Thoughtlessly connect Twitter with LinkedIn and/or Facebook

The Problem: It’s very easy to think that you are saving time and being very efficient by sending all your tweets to LinkedIn or all your Facebook updates to Twitter, but it creates all kinds of jarring issues that newbies will find confusing and experienced Twitter users will find annoying. The language used on each of the platforms is different and Facebook and LinkedIn will allow you longer format updates than Twitter.

What to do instead: It is a minefield that I recommend avoiding. If you must do it, be sure to dive into the settings on LinkedIn and Facebook and understand what you’re really sharing and when. I have written about the problem of sending your LinkedIn updates to Twitter before.

Drop Tweet Bombs

The Problem: I read lots of posts about “doing social media” in 10 minutes per day and the like. While it is possible, it seems that most people think you should send out an entire day’s worth of tweets all at once. This will totally take over your followers’ Twitter streams. That is considered a bit rude in Twitterville.

What to do instead: I’d recommend using a tool like buffer to spread your Tweets out through the day. Also, if you decide to have your jobs or blog posts sent to Twitter automatically via an app like twitterfeed or dlvr.it – please dive into the settings and make sure that it won’t tweet 10 jobs at once. If you are unsure what you are doing – don’t do it!

Turn every word into a #Hashtag

The Problem: It is very simple – tweets containing lots of hashtags are difficult to read, eyeballs skip right over them. If your tweet looks fugly – I’m not clicking on the link!

The Solution: Hashtags are an important way to get noticed when you start out on Twitter, so don’t be put off using them. Keep hashtags to a minimum, one or two is usually plenty. If you want to use more then maybe try some A B Testing to see which works best – does a tweet with #jobs get more clicks and reactions than a tweet with #careers? You should ALWAYS check how a hashtag is being used already, if at all, before including it.

Do you have any Dos and Don’ts for Twitter newbies? Let us know in the comments 🙂

Social Media

Google Plus is arguably the most powerful resource to emerge for sourcers and people researchers for a long time. Irina Shamaeva shared a great post on the SourceCon blog about Google+ for People Sourcing.

If you represent a sizable brand and have not heard of Glassdoor.com, then it might be time to check it out. Glassdoor is a site where people can share information about companies from salaries to company culture to what an interview is like. The site is mainly US focused but is starting to see some usage in Europe and the UK. You might also find this video interview with Samantha Zupan, Corporate Communications Director at Glassdoor.com, interesting.

If you have anything you’d like to share on our weekly news round-up then do let me know – are you hoping to hire a sourcer or an Internet savvy recruiter, planning an event or know of a great tool? Then get in touch.

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Search Engine News

Google launch Knowledge Graph

Social Media News

By far the biggest news in Social this week was Facebook’s IPO. The Social Networking giant filed the paperwork for its initial public offering on 1st February and began trading last week. Mashable have a section dedicated to the Facebook IPO where you can find out more.

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Facebook is fairly tough to search so it doesn’t get too much press from the sourcing community. Facebook is, however, one of the largest people databases on the web with 901 million monthly active users at the end of March 2012. Facebook also holds an unfathomable amount of information about its users.

Recent studies have shown that clicks on Facebook advertising have increased 50% in the last 12 months. Facebook advertising budgets are also increasing. This means that both users and advertisers are getting much more comfortable with the notion of advertising on Facebook. Users are more comfortable to click and advertisers are seeing the benefit.

Put these two things together and you have a very powerful and cheap way to get in front of exactly the kind of people you want to find to fill your job vacancies. I find myself recommending this to my clients more and more when they have very exact requirements to hunt down.

Clicks only cost a few pence, so if you target your ad at just a couple of hundred people you are unlikely to pay as much as one job posting on a job board. I’ve seen companies make placements for as little as £1.75 using Facebook Advertising.

Let me show you what I mean with an example.

Create your Facebook Ad

To start creating your Facebook Ad you will need to scroll to the very bottom of the page and click on “Advertising”.

Let’s suppose you want to find nurses to work at a hospital in Bristol. If you post your job on a job board it might cost hundreds of pounds and anyone might apply, even people that don’t have any relevant skills and qualifications or those that don’t live locally (people are funny that way).

Facebook Ads are very small, you have just a few characters and a picture to play with so make it punchy and very clear.

Target relevant Facebook profiles

Facebook lets you target your ad by location and by keywords. This means that only those likely to be interested and relevant for the role will see it. In this example I have also chosen to limit to those over 20, as you need a degree or a diploma to be a nurse.

Facebook estimates that there are 1,240 people in the Bristol area aged over 20 that have the keyword “Nurse” or “Nursing” on their profiles.

You could also target your ad based on someone’s education. You could target all those in the Bristol area that have listed a nursing degree on their profile or those that say they work at other Bristol Hospitals. For this example, targeting those with a nursing degree worked better – the hospitals did not come up as workplaces, suggesting the people aren’t including this information on their Facebook profiles.

These options give us a highly targeted audience of just 280 people on Facebook. This might seem like a small number but it is better to put your ad in front of a small number of relevant people rather than a large number of people that don’t fit your requirements.

If you wanted to reach more people you could increase this number to 400 people by extending your search to those up to 40km outside of Bristol.

Decide how much you want to spend on your Facebook advertisment

Facebook estimates a good maximum bid to be 45p – so even if you paid that for each click and everyone clicked on your ad, you’d spend a maximum of £126. You can also cap your daily spend on adverting at a minimum of £1.

I would recommend paying for advertising per click rather than per impression. This means that you only pay when someone clicks on your add, it might be displayed hundreds of time, providing you a good branding opportunity, for free!

UK Sourcers Meetup

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The UK Sourcers LinkedIn group is open to all recruitment professionals in the United Kingdom. Members of the group get regular news updates, sourcing challenges and always hear about our events first.

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UK Sourcers is a community run by Katharine Robinson (aka TheSourceress).

It is a resource for UK recruitment professionals to learn more about Internet sourcing techniques.